Most large companies these days have a heterogeneous mix of Private Branch eXchanges (PBXs)/enterprise communication systems. Many of these same companies have a “Hot Desk” environment where employees are allowed to sit at a different desk and a different telephone on occasion, or even each day. These companies would like for their employees to have one single enterprise communication address that can represent that employee for all calls received and made by the employee. These companies would also like for this to be the case regardless of the type and manufacturer of endpoint (e.g., Cisco endpoint, Avaya endpoint, Siemens endpoint, etc.) at which the employee is currently sitting.
Previous attempts to address the above-mentioned problem include: (1) Call Forwarding; (2) Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) “Call me/Call you”; and (3) Internet Protocol (IP) Softphone “Telecommuter” mode. The call forwarding solution simply sends incoming calls to a user's address to their hot-desk number. The SIP “Call me/Call you” can be used to have an application initiate a call from a hot-desk endpoint and make it look to the called party as if he/she was called from the user's address. The IP Softphone “Telecommuter” mode can be used to extend an incoming call to user's address out to the hot-desk number. It can also be used to initiate a call in the “Call me/Call you” paradigm described above.
The available solutions fall short in several ways. First of all, the available solutions do not allow for the user to initiate calls directly from the hot-desk endpoint. Rather, the user must use an application of some sort to initiate a “Call me/Call you” flow so that the far end sees the user's address.
A problem with the IP Softphone solution in particular is that an IP Softphone solution requires the IP Softphone to be running and be registered with a PBX. This softphone application consumes both desktop and PBX resources for the user's address, in addition to those being consumed by the hot-desk endpoint.
A problem with the call forward solution is that the call Forward solution for redirecting incoming calls requires a Computer-Telephone Integration (CTI) link to each of the heterogeneous PBXs. As can be appreciated, these links require time and resources to establish. Another big problem with the call forward solution is that it doesn't address outbound calls.